The tea about actualizing change is that people can do it for the worst reasons if the social pressure and will are correct enough for it, meanwhile you can have the best of reasons and just lie around and do nothing
This song came out when I was 7. I remember watching it over and over and over. I don’t know why it resonated with me 17 years ago, yet it continues to today.
Like any Ph.D. program, what you’re being trained to do is employ a jargon that instantiates your authority in the abstruseness of your prose. You display what you know by writing in a way that other people can’t understand. That’s not how I understand writing. Writing is about sharing what you know with storybook clarity, even and especially if you’re writing about something that’s complicated or morally ambiguous. Also, I like to write about people who are characters, who have limbs and fingers and toes and loves and desires and agonies and triumphs and ages and hair colors. But that’s not how historical writing is taught in a Ph.D. program.
There it is. Every Marxist article can’t deny that planned economies or economies with strict price controls will inevitably lead to shortages of goods and inherently needs to return to market prices in order to sufficiently provide goods to people.
What I speak of is not a mean-spirited exclusivity. It’s not excluding others for the sake of one’s own self aggrandizement or benefit. And exclusivity need not be in opposition to an open and welcoming posture. Two critical things need to be clear.
First, the kind of exclusivity I’m talking about does not mean that everything is completely static, or that no one immigrates or emigrates. Exclusivity is not opposed to welcoming others, it’s simply discerning. Second, the basis on which to exclude must be legitimate — not arbitrary — and it must not be tied to race or ethnicity. Instead, it must be about values and culture.
If the value of openness or inclusivity (which are virtuous if limited) takes on the ultimate importance, it spells the death of any distinctive culture. In his book “Why Liberalism Failed,” Patrick Deneen makes the point that nature, time, and place are the “three cornerstones of human experience” that “form the basis of culture.” I would further contend that without some continuity of place, people, and relationships, there is no culture.
But today’s left embraces inclusion as ultimate, which leads to absurdity. An example brilliantly displaying the mistake of holding inclusion as an ultimate value are the “nondiscrimination” policies on college campuses that were big news several years ago. The policies held that campus groups could not fully participate in campus life if they insisted on requiring their leaders to hold certain beliefs.
It’s hard to conceive of a clearer portrait of how embracing a vague idea of inclusivity ironically destroys all meaning. When an atheist leads a Christian group, or an ardent pro-lifer leads a pro-choice group, the organization is rendered farcical. Without exclusion, a community becomes vague beyond all recognition. (emphasis added)
CultML 